Ximian GNOME 1.4: The Monkey Has Landed - page 2

The long wait is over.

Using a graphical installer (either obtained by piping output from the text-based
Lynx web browser through the shell or downloading the installer directly)

Downloading
the packages that comprise the distribution and installing them individually

For
Debian users, adding a line to /etc/apt/sources.list allows the packages to be
downloaded and installed with apt-get.

Each of the methods is described in detail on the Ximian download page, and we won't
reproduce them in detail here. We did, however, perform several installations of Ximian
GNOME on several machines running Red Hat 7.0, Debian GNU/Linux 2.2, and Progeny Debian
GNU/Linux 1.0 (which is not officially supported). And we have the following observations
on each:

Installing on Red Hat 7.0

The Red Hat installation was performed using the GUI installer, which we downloaded
instead of running the Lynx command after we realized there were some severe bandwidth
issues during the initial frenzy to obtain the software. It also paid off in the long run
because on one occasion we made it through most of the download only to fall victim to a
"500 Internal Error" that kept us from downloading the gnome-libs package. Returning a
few hours later, the problem had resolved itself, but during a later install on another
Red Hat machine, the problem cropped up again.

There are several options using the GUI install tool. Users can opt to download the
minimum number of packages, which weighed in at a total of 75.3MB. An option for
downloading only productivity applications totalled 92.4MB, a "normal" installation took
136.3MB, and the "everything" option involved 146.8MB of downloads. Adding the
development packages to the "everything" option brought the total in to just under 180MB.

Another choice involves how to download the files. Because of the cost of maintaining
Akamai server access, Ximian opted to change to a more traditional mirroring approach
toward the end of last week. Five mirrors are currently available, plus Ximian's own
servers: RPMFind in Cambridge, MA and France (two locations), PlanetMirror in Australia,
and a server at Duke University in North Carolina.

Once the download is underway, very little user interaction is required. We
encountered several of the aforementioned "500 Internal Error" messages while performing
the download. The installer allows users to back up all the way to the beginning of the
process, but we found that a package causing that error tended to cause it to happen no
matter which mirror we used. We eventually finished the install successfully after a few
restarts.

One other issue we did encounter on an additional machine running Red Hat 7 was an
unfortunate tendency on the part of the installer to consume all the space on the root
partition. Remembering this problem from the release of Helix Code GNOME 1.2, we used the
'-d' option to specify a more spacious partition into which the installer could save the
downloaded files. Unfortunately, this didn't fix the problem. Though the downloaded
packages fit comfortably in the 20GB partition we directed them to, the 80MB we had left
in the root partition was consumed and caused the installation to halt after the downloads
were completed and the installer had handled the bulk of the dependency checking and
package configuration. We didn't resolve the problem by the time this story was ready for
publication despite some close examinations of the root filesystem to find what was
consuming the space.

Installing on Progeny and Debian GNU/Linux 2.2

We opted to use the apt-get for our Progeny and Debian 2.2 installations. We added the
following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://red-carpet.ximian.com/debian stable main

Though Progeny's distribution is largely based on Debian Woody (testing), we opted to
use the Potato (stable) directory for this installation.

According to the download page for Debian-based systems, the process should be as
simple as executing the command

apt-get update && apt-get install task-helix-gnome

Unfortunately, task-helix-gnome didn't appear to be available, so we were left with
working out how to best collect everything on our own. For the Potato installation, which
already had Ximian GNOME 1.2 on it, we used 'apt-get dist-upgrade' to update the bulk of
our GNOME installation, and then followed up with a few specific file acquisitions for
things we didn't already have installed (such as the Nautilus file manager.) Using
dselect at this stage so as to identify packages that are recognized as new additions to
the available database is recommended.

In both cases, the missing 'task-helix-gnome' package was something of a hindrance,
though it only took a few sessions with dselect to straighten the matter out.

To get the full Ximian experience, Debian users will want to make sure they use the
command: